Anthony Gormley drawings used to highlight climate change crisis

The Guardian is making climate change its main story for the next week. The editor is leaving and he is trying to make sure that before he goes the paper has done its upmost to tell everyone how important climate change is. It does look as if governments are taking no notice but as Naomi Klein states we can all try and make a difference. 

The following is from the Guardian article on Anthony Gormley's contribution.

I'm also trying to make my own response, if anything is a vital subject matter today, raising awareness of climate change is.

Full text on Gormley from 'The Guardian'

Connection: Anthony Gormley

A work by the artist Antony Gormley has been shown for the first time in the Guardian as the newspaper published an extract on Friday from Naomi Klein’s book on climate change.

The piece, called Connection, shows a disturbing silhouette of a giant body against a deep glow which could be manmade or natural. Both the body and the landscape appear to be equally toxic, raising questions of how humanity is impacting the planet through climate change.

“It’s very important that the image is not a didactic one,” said Gormley of the work, made with aniline dye on paper.

“Hopefully it gives you an opportunity to put yourself in the place offered by this silhouette and to think about your connection to and dependence on the context in which we find ourselves... the most important being the elemental world that we have managed for the first time ever, for any species, to have destabilised.”

The image will wrap around Saturday’s printed copy of the Guardian and be handed out at a climate change protest march through central London.

Gormley was minded to share the image because of the concerns he shares with the marchers about the irreparable damage we are doing to the planet. “We are sleepwalking into a massive human disaster.”

He said he despaired of politicians who thought no further forward than the next five years – “they are just not capable of long-term thinking.” Gormley has also shared an art work with the Guardian not seen in public before, called Evening IV, made with carbon, casein and Indian ink on paper. It accompanies the extract from Klein’s book, This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs Climate. 

Evening IV by Antony Gormley

Naomi Klein’s book argues that capitalism is ill-suited to handle the challenge that global warming presents – and that tackling climate change can also address inequality in society.

Gormley agrees. “If the division between rich and poor is already chronic and very consciously in people’s minds now, then the division between those who are banished from their homes because of rising sea levels and temperatures will be a hell of a lot more painful.

“As Naomi Klein has ceaselessly pointed out, we have to make politicians take notice.

“Short termism is the way capitalism works and the way politicians work and capitalism is not going to solve this. We have to find another form of defining value that is not market value.

“Nobody wants to face the truth that actually air, water, sunlight are resources that are certainly not free.”

Gormley has made previous work which explores questions around climate change, not least Another Place which consists of 100 cast iron sculptures of Gormley’s own body on Crosby beach, looking out at the water from the mouth of the Mersey to the River Alt.

The figures ask questions around humanity’s relationship with nature, whether we are a toxic body and whether we can live sustainably.

 “Can we change what looks like Armageddon into a real go to find global governance that will allow human beings to work with the forces of nature in a sustainable way?”